Community leaders in Lexington are the latest to stand at a fork in the broadband road. In September, the franchise agreement between the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government (LFUCG) and Time Warner Cable expired, resulting in a month-to-month agreement continuation. As they negotiate a new contract, local citizens have called for consideration of a municipal network.
When the contract was originally negotiated in the 1990s, the community was primarily interested in cable TV servce. As broadband has become critical infrastructure for residents, businesses, and government, the community’s focus shifted. Lexington customers have complained repeatedly about Internet and cable TV service from Time Warner Cable. A February Kentucky.com article noted that local consumers complained over 300 times to Lexington’s Urban County Government, the entity responsible for contract negotiations. According to the article:
The biggest single category of complaints was about price and the volatility of monthly rates. Other complaints were that the cable TV service “repeatedly fails, resets or freezes”; that there was an extended wait time and/or “unhelpful responses” in customer service; and that email and Internet “had declined in service” and showed “significantly slower service.”
The City Council considered the situation bad enough to debate whether or not to appoint an ombudsman to advocate for Lexington consumers.
The community wonders how the proposed merger between Time Warner Cable and Comcast will impact their current service. While the Vice Mayor seems to think it is an “almost golden opportunity” to deal with a different provider, local citizen Roy M. Cornett has a different perspective. He wrote for Business Lexington.com:
We can choose to maintain the status quo and allow out-of-state corporations to continue to control our access to the Internet, or we can rescind the franchise agreements to the copper and fiber lying in the ground around our community and treat the Internet as the piece of infrastructure essential for our future economic growth that it is.
We would just note that this is not an either/or proposition. They can both develop a new franchise or not separately from deciding to move forward with some smart municipal investments.
As the LFCUG has moved forward with franchise negotiations, they opened up the discussion at City Council meetings. Cornett attended a Cable Franchise Workshop to learn about the process. What he learned is that the LFCUG possesses very little power in negotiations, due to federal law. In fact, if Time Warner Cable meets a very low standard, the LFCUG has no option but to renew.
Cornett and others in the community wonder if Lexington wants to go down the same Internet road again – expensive, unreliable, and ruled from a far off corner office. He addresses the question in another article on the Barefoot and Progressive site:
If the Time Warner [Cable] and Comcast merger goes through, Lexington will not only have piss poor download speeds, but caps on the amount of data you can use in a month. Comcast currently has a cap of 300 gigabytes per month for customers in Elizabethtown and Campbellsville, Kentucky. To put this in perspective, my family’s usage as of February 15, was 99 gigabytes for the month and we still have two weeks to go. I am terrified of what it will be in a few years when my youngest kids become teenagers.
Cornett reached out to us when he wanted to learn more about the possibilities of a muni for Lexington:
The City of Chattanooga just recently built a municipal ISP to provide gigabit service to 147,000 homes at a cost of $330 million (of which $111 million was provided by the feds). Christopher Mitchell, the director of Telecommunications as Commons Initiative for the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, did some very rough back-of-the-envelope calculations for the City of Lexington and estimates that a full gigabit fiber network to every resident and business would be somewhere in the $200 million range.
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Those are huge numbers and should give anyone pause, but consider that we are spending $1.6 million on sidewalks for Tates Creek Road, $17 million for resurfacing a few blocks of South Limestone and $310 million dollars renovating Rupp Arena. Ask yourself if any of the above projects could come close to offering the economic impact that gigabit internet service would bring. It isn’t even close.
In his Business Lexington.com article, Cornett encourages a new coalition, the Bluegrass Economic Advancement Movement (BEAM), to take up the muni possibility. The group is a collaboration between Louisville and Lexington with support from the Brookings Institute. The goal of BEAM is to bring quality jobs to the Bluegrass and increase export activity.
Cornett, who we expect to hear more from, writes in his Barefoot and Progressive article:
I won’t speculate on the motives of the corporations for attempting to kill competition, but the issue of our city possessing a modern, reasonably priced, continually upgraded network is essential to our future.
This is not a fight we should shy away from. On the contrary, this is a fight we need to embrace, and it can be the lynchpin that takes the BEAM super region from a good idea to a shining success. I urge Mayors Gray and Fischer to – at the very least – explore the option of retaking control of this vital component of our infrastructure.